Do you want a Job or a Calling?

If We Believe in Change, We must be W... Orthodoxy

Do you want a Job or a Calling?

I’ve been thinking recently about the first time I met nuns. Yes, Catholic nuns. It was in Detroit in the early 1990s. I suppose that I had met Catholic nuns earlier in my life, for instance, my Latin teacher in high school was a former nun (care to guess why? I do not actually know, but certainly can speculate), but in the early 1990s, I had the opportunity to work with nuns and have more sustained conversations and engagements with nuns.

I was working at the metro Detroit gay and lesbian community center and we were working on building support for gay and lesbian rights among religious communities. Today, this seems like a relatively easy project, but in the early 1990s, support for gay and lesbian people among mainstream Christian communities was tenuous at best, and for Catholics it was challenging. Yes, Dignity had been working within Catholic communities for a number of years by that point, and yes, Catholic communities in the city of Detroit in particular are very progressive. Still, the work was filled with difficult conversations.

The nuns embraced the difficulty of the project. I embraced the passion and righteous commitments of the nuns. Honestly, and without too much drama, working with Catholic nuns was the first time when I felt as though I saw and felt the presence of G-d. These women had clear principles that they could discuss with ease and convictions, but never with simplicity or blind faith. They thought deeply about everything. They acknowledged complexity and conflict. They respected conflict and believed in it. Mostly, they respected people, even people with whom they disagreed vehemently (often these were other Catholics and often these were Catholics with various hierarchal positions above them.) At the time, as a young woman trying to make my way in the world, this was deeply meaningful to me. Even as I think of it today, it inspires me.

More than the way that they approached working with other human beings and the conflict that invariably arises, I admired the nuns for their calling. Prior to working with nuns, I might have mocked having a calling as an idea with little relevance in the modern world. Meeting, talking to, and working with nuns, I came to understand that a calling is not necessarily divinely inspired. Rather, a calling comes from a deep and passionate set of convictions in the world; a calling is a response to a critical engagement with the world in which one learns about and analyzes the conditions of people’s lives, then comes to a series of shared insights about change and commits to working to implement those changes. Among nuns, I came to understand callings in a new and meaningful way.

I determined that I, like many of the nuns, have a calling and that I wanted to organize my life in a way that I could work to fulfill my calling. How I implement this conviction is different than how people do it in religious orders, but the principles are the same.

I have been thinking about these questions of a job and a calling lately during this period of transition in my life. The pull of a job, forty or forty-five hours a week to have a life, feed my family (a St. Bernard eats a ginormous amount of food, in case you were wondering), and seek happiness outside of work can have an intellectual and emotional appeal. After a number of years of working sixty and seventy hour work weeks, I recognize the toll it takes and wonder, is there another way to be?

Then I meet a group of people who live with a calling. The encounter was unexpected, but for a day and a half, I was immersed with a group of people who work at a calling. It reminded me of being in my twenties again, of being at the community center, of doing fundraising trainings for queer community groups (because we desperately needed resources), of working with nuns. And I know, while it is fine for people to have a job and a life organized around other passions, I have a calling, and I want to live the life of a calling.